Getting hacked sucks. Everyone seems to agree on that much. The threat of having one’s person information opened up for all the world to see is enough to set anyone over the edge. Perhaps that’s what happened in the case of the dating site PlentyofFish. It’s hard to say. At the moment, all we’ve got are a lot of dissonant, panicked posts from different sides of the story.

Here’s what we do know–Markus Frind, the CEO of PlentyofFish.com, a Vancouver-based free dating site was contacted by an Argentinean hacker named Chris Russo to inform him about security flaws in the site. This is where things take two starkly different directions, depending on who you listen to.

According to Frind, this was the beginning of “an incredibly well planned and sophisticated attack.” Russo apparently signed up for an account (using his real name, strangely enough) and reaped the fruits of the aforementioned flaws.

Says Frind,

It took Chris Russo 2 days to break in; he didn’t even try to hide behind a proxy, signed up under his real name and executed the attacks while logged in as himself. At midnight Miami time my wife gets a call from Chris Russo that plentyoffish has been hacked into and that Russians have taken over his computer and are trying to kill him, and his life is in extreme danger and they are currently downloading plentyoffish’s database.

Russo, meanwhile, tells a very different story, complaining of “death threats” from Frind (according to this blog), “Plentyoffish.com exposes 30,000,000 users information, we reported that, and get nothing but trouble and are threatened, directly by the founder Mr. Markus Frind.”

Russo continues,

While we were creating the legal documents in order to proceed, Markus Frind got progressively more aggressive and unresposive [sic] with us, and told us to speak with their employees, Kate and Jay, because there was a serial killer, murdering people from the website.

And, quoting a letter supposedly sent from Frind to Russo,

Then i’m going to sue you In Canada, US and UK and argintina [sic]. I amgoing [sic]to completely destroy your life, no one is ever going to hire you for anything again, this isn’t piratebay and we definately [sic] aren’t fooling around.

Frind’s explanation was an admittedly sleep deprived rant about how “annoying it is to have someone constantly harassing and trying to scare your wife at all hours of the day.” He ended it by stated that he’s attempted to address the situation by e-mailing Russo’s mother.

Former Washington Post reporter Brian Krebs (cited in Frind’s post) chalks the whole thing up to paranoia on Frind’s part. “Getting hacked is no fun,” writes Krebs. “Learning that you’ve been hacked when a reporter calls is probably even less fun. But for better or worse, I have notified dozens of companies about various breaches over the years, and I’ve learned to read between the lines in how victims respond.”

Krebs states his surprise at awakening this morning “to find a rambling blog post that indirectly accuses me of participating in an extortion scam, before mildly backtracking from that claim.”